YouTube Videos Unavailable on Specifric Wi-Fi Network

Factual Questions
1

I was watching a long YouTube video this morning on my desktop computer and only got about halfway through it before a scheduled service appointment on my car. So I brought my laptop with me and figured I’d watch the rest there at the dealership. When I got there I connected to their wi-fi network and opened up the YouTube website, went to my watch history, and there was a note to the effect of “some unavailable videos have been removed from this list” and the video wasn’t there. Strange. So I go to my browser history, which is sync’d between devices, and click on the link to the video, and it opens up the page, but there’s one of YouTube’s “this video is no longer available” messages. This isn’t a channel I usually watch so I checked out their homepage, which was mostly blank, there were only two videos, and no community posts. There weren’t any broken images, missing page assets, or failures to load, so I thought I caught the channel in the middle of a takedown. I checked the channel Twitter account, which is very active, but no mention of any problems. I didn’t think much more of it, and went on to other things. I watched a few videos on other channels I follow, and everything there seemed totally normal.

Now that I’m back home, I pull the video back up on my desktop, and it plays just fine. I check the channel and now all the pages are fully populated (it’s a small channel though, with only 10 videos total). On my laptop it all shows now as well. This makes no sense. If the car dealership had some sort of blocking on their wi-fi router then I would imagine the page wouldn’t load at all, or it would load with a bunch of broken assets. As far as I know it’s not possible to block specific YouTube channels on an internal network, or could this actually have been some parental/content filtering? The video does have explicit language (and the other videos I watched don’t), but it does seem odd that some videos would still be available, and all the community posts would be gone. I suppose it’s possible that the wi-fi network thing is just a coincidence and there was simply a glitch with the channel/YouTube itself, but if not, this seems like a very strange way to “disappear” content if it was deliberate. Thoughts?

This is the video in question:

2

Although their guest network is likely firewalled off or otherwise separated from their workplace network, it’s likely that it shares an outbound internet connection. They may have blocked certain sites or certain types of media for bandwidth reasons or to limit the amount of slacking off their staff can do - and this restriction might also reflect in the guest network, depending which side of the firewall the restrictions are implemented.
Even if the guest network has a quota that prevents it from impinging on the workplace bandwidth, it could still be done to prevent one customer hogging the guest network bandwidth.

3

I meant to add - YouTube videos are served from a distributed content delivery network - loads of different servers in different countries on different IP addresses, across multiple domains - it’s common for older methods of trying to block ‘a website’ to be weirdly patchy when the website works like YT does.

4

Were you able to post comments on the other videos? Because, at my doctor’s office, I remember running into an issue where YouTube would run only in restricted mode. I looked it up, and apparently this was a setting that could be enabled on the wi-fi network itself. With this mode on, I could not leave any comments or see any videos that were considered 18+.

I would find it odd if Lady Emily’s videos were all 18+, though. I would think that this information would have come up. So it does seem odd she would show no videos at all by this setting.

In theory, this sort of thing would be an excellent use for a VPN. However, in my case at least, I found that my VPN app was also blocked on the doctor’s office’s wi-fi.

5

I didn’t try but comments at least showed up on the other videos.

She did have two videos showing out of 10, but there was no indication that the others even existed.

I suspect you’re right now that you mentioned “restricted mode.” Apparently that is configurable on the router/DNS level. How To Enable YouTube Restrict / Moderate Modes I’m just surprised how opaque it is. Rather than stating that videos, comments, etc. have been restricted/blocked, the site just pretends like they don’t exist. That’s rather creepy IMO.